The Thai Language

My attempt at the study of lingiustix, Noam Chomsky eat your heart out.

Apologies to my Thai friends who maybe reading this, they already know all of this a lot better than I do and would probably disagree with my interpretation. Also, first up a confession. Being an engineer by profession, I’m at home with numbers and science, when it comes to languages and arts I’m not in the fast lane. This is a handicap to such an extent I have taken to the concept of calling people by numbers because I can’t remember their names ( Hi to 17 ), What started out to be a joke actually works, also you can always refer to the old saying "would you trust an engineer who could spell ?".
I accepted the fact that when I started learning Thai that at some point I would have the feeling of "well that’s just plain stupid", it is like that when learning any foreign language and anybody who has struggled with the Germanic dem, ders and das’s or with most European languages the concept of a female post office whilst a chemist is male will attest to this fact. Also the English language can hang its head in shame with some of its absurdities which are so ingrained in our cognitive abilities we just don’t see it. A good example of this happened a few days ago, I was having lunch at Kwan’s mothers house with her mother and brother and we were arranging a dinner with the whole family and I said it was good to ‘keep in touch’, we all know what the phrase ‘keep in touch’ means but if you break it down into its individual words, anybody coming across the phrase for the first time is going to be a tad confused as no words in the phrase actually convey what it actually means. The best approach I have found is "Yes it is stupid, but that’s the way it is, get on with it"
Any way back to the Thai language, in trying to give a fair and balanced critique I’ll start with what I would consider the plus’s, explain the major differences and then run through some of the gripes and plain absurdities.
Thai has some remarkably good ideas such as phonetic spelling (always a favourite with engineers), no tenses, no genders, no definite articles and no upper or lower cases. The principal difference with Thai is that it is tonal, similar to Mandarin and the tone of the word does have a direct bearing on its meaning. There can be up to five tones for each word which are common (i.e.: no tone), high, low, rising and falling, and it is very important to get it right. The most frustrating thing about trying to speak Thai is if you do not pronounce it correctly you will not be understood. I thought they were joking at first but they don’t two words which sound identical to our ears is very different to Thai ears. Because of this, the Thai’s have an extensive alphabet which consists of 44 consonants and 32 vowels and 4 letters which have the audacity to be somewhere between the two. On top of this there are a multitude of additional symbols and marks which are added to make sure the word is pronounced correct. Speaking from a particularly English point of view, we are blessed by the fact our language is not full of tone marks, umlauts and other linguistic furniture.
Another important mention of the use of polite particles which do not have any equivalent in European languages and are gender specific, I lied about not being any genders in Thai language, the difference being that they are only used personally. The word for ‘I’ is Pom (with a rising tone) for male and ‘Di-Chan or Chan’ for female. Oddly there is no gender distinction for he or she, they are both Kao hence when you here a Thai person talking English they will often get them mixed up. The polite particle are Krup for a male and Ka for a female and can follow just about every sentence or statement, the more polite particles you use the more polite you are talking.
Rule one when learning Thai you must learn the Thai alphabet because of its phonetic nature if you can read the word you can pronounce the word. Hence the need for 32 vowels to make sure that all the vowels sounds have their own identity. The problem with English is that there are not enough. For example take the words wind and wind, look again, not the same word, wind as in movement of air and wind as what we used to do with old fashioned clocks and watches (a fact I noticed from the lyrics of stairway to heaven on Led Zep 4, take away the guitar solo and wind and wind appear very close together on the lyric sheet.)
So Thai language good in the fact they have recognised the fact there should be more than 5 vowels. Thai language bad in how they go about displaying them. A vowel can appear in one of 4 places either in front, after, above or below the constant it is linked to to make the syllable. Which is odd but not annoying, the annoying thing is what they look like. In the Thai alphabet a lot of consonants and vowels look so similar it is neigh impossible to tell the apart. One vowel in particular which does not have an English equivalent (or any other language I know of for that matter) and represents the sound you make when you step in something disgusting (directly quoted from one of my Thai language book). It is so similar in appearance to the letter for ‘ii’ that you have to use another letter after it to distinguish it. Now that is just plain stupid.
Second problem, the Thai alphabet consists of 44 consonants which are broken down into low class, middle class and high class. Nothing to do with marketing demographics just another mechanism to work with the tonal rules. But there are up to three constants for each sound. They have dropped two of them a few years ago; the reason for this, according to my Thai teacher is because the introduction of the Imperial typewriter and the need to develop a mechanism designed for the English Alphabet having to be adapted for Thai alphabet. It was too much of a headache to try to build extra keys into the typewriter therefore two of them had to go, this was a missed opportunity to get rid of the other redundant letters and make us all a bit happier. It’s a good story and I admit to not going through the sums to see it is at least feasible, add all the vowels and consonants together, take away the punctuation marks ( Thai does not have any ) and you should end up with the same number.
Some of the Thai letters are distinguished by being taller than ‘the line’, this is fine in principle but also remember that some vowels appear above the letter and hence there is a clash of the vowel and the letter. This is further complicated by the possible usage of tone or other marks which appear above the letter. It starts to get pretty crowded up there and the whole thing starts stacking up like a game of snakes and ladders. Contributing to these problems some of the tone marks and symbols are much smaller than the letters so if the font is small those of use with aging eyes have real difficulty seeing them, I have taken to using a magnifying glass to see them in my English-Thai dictionary.
Possibly the most annoying thing about the reading & writing of Thai is there are no gaps between the words, so a sentence is a continuous stream of letters. The history of this, according to my Thai teacher is the fact that the early days of Thai script was carved from stone and not written on paper or papyrus. Of course the real estate on stone is very scarce and hence vowels appear both above and below the consonant and the resistance to use punctuation marks, therefore the only way to distinguish between sentences is to leave a gap. This does makes sense, but you would have thought with the advent of pen and paper and the arrival of foreign (European) lexicons you would have thought that some bright spark would think "hey these full stops are a good idea, then we can put spaces between the words", but this absurd practice has been maintained well into the computer age.
On the plus side the Thai language has a distinct reluctance to make up a new word when a reworking of an existing word or combination of existing words will do. For example the word for toilet is hong nam, nam is the word for water and is reused extensively, hong is room, toilet therefoe ‘ room water’, the word for eye is dtat therefore ‘tear’ is nam dtat, it is that simple. (note there are tonal rules for these words there is just no practical way of displaying them on an English keyboard).
In terms of the order of words in a sentence there are some peculiarities, oddly the general rule is similar to English (adjective-verb- subject etc.) So in many cases the construction of the sentences is quite easy, however it completely changes when it comes to questions and their answers, the Thai language not having a specific words for yes or no (freaky !!). It is a system I am still struggling with but the general rule is a question is asked which includes a question particle and a positive or negative confirmation is requested from the questionee. In many cases the polite particle ( krup for male, ka for female) suffices if it is the right type of question but possibly the best way to describe is that at the end of each question the questioner asks "is that so ?" to which the questionee replies either "that is so" or "that is not so".
This is just a brief apprise of what I have learnt so far about the Thai language, clearly there is a multitude of other interesting and surprising points such as Thai is based on Sanskrit and therefore predates English by about a millennium, also the word for expert of some who is skilled is nak, I have pondered whether this could have been the origin of the slang word of ‘knack’.
I hope this diatribe has been enlightening for you, my attempts to learn such an alien language in the last year or so has been an interesting and fulfilling journey, I have attempted, with little success, in learning French & German in my time and I have found Thai much much harder. It has really been a step back to fundamental sounds and how they can re created in some form of lexicon. This is why you will often see Thai nouns such as place names translated into English differently, there is no right or wrong way to do this, they just make up the best estimation of the letters that will produce that particular sounds.
The Thais certainly appreciate the fact that a furongse has gone to the trouble to learn their language and after a week in Bangkok I am think I am starting to get the hang of it, I look forward to your comments with interest and I am happy to take the complaints from fluent Thai speakers on the chin.
Keep upright.